balata data
2021
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From 2018 to 2021, I lived in Jaffa, an ancient Arab port city that was occupied by Israel during the 1948 War—known as the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), which resulted in the mass displacement of its Palestinian residents. In December 1948, Jaffa was declared part of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality. The Palestinians in Jaffa went from being a majority in their city and homeland, numbering 120,000 before the war, to only 4,000—a minority in Israel’s main metropolitan area.
The neighbourhood where I lived was originally established by fishermen who arrived in the mid-19th century from the village of Jabalia, located north of Gaza City. They named the area after their place of origin. In the early 1950s, as part of a plan to Judaize former Arab cities in the newly occupied territories, many Arabic street names were replaced with names honoring prominent Zionist leaders and rabbinical figures. The name of ‘Jabalia’ neighbourhood in Jaffa was Hebraized to ‘Giv'at Aliya’—possibly alluding to the influx of new European Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania who settled there as part of the plan to Judaize the city.
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On my first walk along the beach, I stumbled upon a striking phenomenon: colorful pebbles like terrazzo stones and pieces of colored floor tiles, parts of kitchenware ceramic, and fragments of windows glass, all shaped by years of erosion in seawater—washing ashore. My beach walks soon turned into an obsession that formed itself into a ritual. I spent hours picking up fragments of what I would soon discover were remnants of Jaffa’s demolished homes reapearing on its shore.
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In October 1969, a brief report in a local Hebrew-language newspaper announced a municipal decision to designate a 1,100-meter stretch of Jaffa’s coastline as an official dumping site for construction waste. This decision was part of another municipal plan to dry out land in order to enlarge the coastal area. Over the next three decades, Jaffa’s coastline gradually turned into an environmental hazard. A mountain of debris rose to a height of 15 meters, slowly altering the landscape and eventually blocking the sea view from the windows of nearby apartment buildings.
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In 2005, a municipal urban renewal plan was launched to address decades of neglect. At the core of the project, 1.2 million tons of debris—out of a total of 7 million tons of construction waste—were recycled on-site and reused as the foundation for Park Midron, a public park spanning over 200,000 square meters. Of the remaining 5.8 million tons, half was transported to another location, while the other half was pushed into the sea. Every year since then, just before the official start of beach season, heavy trucks and tractors arrive and, for several days, filter the sand, clearing out rubble and debris from Jaffa’s destroyed homes that continue to reappear along the coast.
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In a local factory, originally located in Jaffa, floor tiles are still handmade today by the late owner's son. The factory was jointly managed by Palestinian and Jewish partners until the 1948 war, when the Jewish owner was forced to relocate the factory to Tel Aviv, while the Palestinian partner fled to Amman. Years later, after the 1967 war, they met each other in Gaza, but their partnership was never revived. At this factory, I worked to repurpose stones I had collected into new floor tiles.
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The found objets embedded in the cement serve as a persistent reminder of Palestine’s history, which, to this day, faces constant attempts at erasure. The new floor tiles act as an archive, serving as a preservation capsule for the life once imprinted on them and now holding a physical potential for reuse.
